OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Overview on Smart Contracts: Challenges, Advances and Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Smart contract technology is reshaping conventional industry and business processes. Being embedded in blockchains, smart contracts enable the contractual terms of an agreement to be enforced automatically without the intervention of a trusted third party. As a result, smart contracts can cut down administration and save services costs, improve the efficiency of business processes and reduce the risks. Although smart contracts are promising to drive the new wave of innovation in business processes, there are a number of challenges to be tackled.This paper presents a survey on smart contracts. We first introduce blockchains and smart contracts. We then present the challenges in smart contracts as well as recent technical advances. We also compare typical smart contract platforms and give a categorization of smart contract applications along with some representative examples.
Estimation of Spectral Risk Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the problem of estimating a spectral risk measure (SRM) from i.i.d. samples, and propose a novel method that is based on numerical integration. We show that our SRM estimate concentrates exponentially, when the underlying distribution has bounded support. Further, we also consider the case when the underlying distribution is either Gaussian or exponential, and derive a concentration bound for our estimation scheme. We validate the theoretical findings on a synthetic setup, and in a vehicular traffic routing application.
Analyzing Structures in the Semantic Vector Space: A Framework for Decomposing Word Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Word embeddings are rich word representations, which in combination with deep neural networks, lead to large performance gains for many NLP tasks. However, word embeddings are represented by dense, real-valued vectors and they are therefore not directly interpretable. Thus, computational operations based on them are also not well understood. In this paper, we present an approach for analyzing structures in the semantic vector space to get a better understanding of the underlying semantic encoding principles. We present a framework for decomposing word embeddings into smaller meaningful units which we call sub-vectors. The framework opens up a wide range of possibilities analyzing phenomena in vector space semantics, as well as solving concrete NLP problems: We introduce the category completion task and show that a sub-vector based approach is superior to supervised techniques; We present a sub-vector based method for solving the word analogy task, which substantially outperforms different variants of the traditional vector-offset method.
Active Learning for Segmentation Based on Bayesian Sample Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Segmentation of anatomical structures is a fundamental image analysis task for many applications in the medical field. Deep learning methods have been shown to perform well, but for this purpose large numbers of manual annotations are needed in the first place, which necessitate prohibitive levels of resources that are often unavailable. In an active learning framework of selecting informed samples for manual labeling, expert clinician time for manual annotation can be optimally utilized, enabling the establishment of large labeled datasets for machine learning. In this paper, we propose a novel method that combines representativeness with uncertainty in order to estimate ideal samples to be annotated, iteratively from a given dataset. Our novel representativeness metric is based on Bayesian sampling, by using information-maximizing autoencoders. We conduct experiments on a shoulder magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dataset for the segmentation of four musculoskeletal tissue classes. Quantitative results show that the annotation of representative samples selected by our proposed querying method yields an improved segmentation performance at each active learning iteration, compared to a baseline method that also employs uncertainty and representativeness metrics. For instance, with only 10% of the dataset annotated, our method reaches within 5% of Dice score expected from the upper bound scenario of all the dataset given as annotated (an impractical scenario due to resource constraints), and this gap drops down to a mere 2% when less than a fifth of the dataset samples are annotated. Such active learning approach to selecting samples to annotate enables an optimal use of the expert clinician time, being often the bottleneck in realizing machine learning solutions in medicine.
Non-Orthogonal eMBB-URLLC Radio Access for Cloud Radio Access Networks with Analog Fronthauling
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

This paper considers the coexistence of Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) and enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) services in the uplink of Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture based on the relaying of radio signals over analog fronthaul links. While Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) to the radio resources enables the isolation and the separate design of different 5G services, Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) can enhance the system performance by sharing wireless and fronthaul resources. This paper provides an information-theoretic perspective in the performance of URLLC and eMBB traffic under both OMA and NOMA. The analysis focuses on standard cellular models with additive Gaussian noise links and a finite inter-cell interference span, and it accounts for different decoding strategies such as puncturing, Treating Interference as Noise (TIN) and Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC). Numerical results demonstrate that, for the considered analog fronthauling C-RAN architecture, NOMA achieves higher eMBB rates with respect to OMA, while guaranteeing reliable low-rate URLLC communication with minimal access latency. Moreover, NOMA under SIC is seen to achieve the best performance, while, unlike the case with digital capacity-constrained fronthaul links, TIN always outperforms puncturing.
Learning to Generate Dense Point Clouds with Textures on Multiple Categories
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

3D reconstruction from images is a core problem in computer vision. With recent advances in deep learning, it has become possible to recover plausible 3D shapes even from single RGB images for the first time. However, obtaining detailed geometry and texture for objects with arbitrary topology remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for reconstructing point clouds from RGB images. Unlike other methods, we can recover dense point clouds with hundreds of thousands of points, and we also include RGB textures. In addition, we train our model on multiple categories which leads to superior generalization to unseen categories compared to previous techniques. We achieve this using a two-stage approach, where we first infer an object coordinate map from the input RGB image, and then obtain the final point cloud using a reprojection and completion step. We show results on standard benchmarks that demonstrate the advantages of our technique. Code is available at https://github.com/TaoHuUMD/3D-Reconstruction.
Teaching Responsible Data Science: Charting New Pedagogical Territory
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

Although numerous ethics courses are available, with many focusing specifically on technology and computer ethics, pedagogical approaches employed in these courses rely exclusively on texts rather than on software development or data analysis. Technical students often consider these courses unimportant and a distraction from the "real" material. To develop instructional materials and methodologies that are thoughtful and engaging, we must strive for balance: between texts and coding, between critique and solution, and between cutting-edge research and practical applicability. Finding such balance is particularly difficult in the nascent field of responsible data science (RDS), where we are only starting to understand how to interface between the intrinsically different methodologies of engineering and social sciences. In this paper we recount a recent experience in developing and teaching an RDS course to graduate and advanced undergraduate students in data science. We then dive into an area that is critically important to RDS -- transparency and interpretability of machine-assisted decision-making, and tie this area to the needs of emerging RDS curricula. Recounting our own experience, and leveraging literature on pedagogical methods in data science and beyond, we propose the notion of an "object-to-interpret-with". We link this notion to "nutritional labels" -- a family of interpretability tools that are gaining popularity in RDS research and practice. With this work we aim to contribute to the nascent area of RDS education, and to inspire others in the community to come together to develop a deeper theoretical understanding of the pedagogical needs of RDS, and contribute concrete educational materials and methodologies that others can use. All course materials are publicly available at https://dataresponsibly.github.io/courses.
Overcoming the Channel Estimation Barrier in Massive MIMO Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

A new wave of wireless services, including virtual reality, autonomous driving and internet of things, is driving the design of new generations of wireless systems to deliver ultra-high data rates, massive number of connected devices and ultra low latency. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the critical underlying technologies that allow future wireless networks to meet these service needs. This article discusses the application of deep learning (DL) for massive MIMO channel estimation in wireless networks by integrating the underlying characteristics of channels in future high-speed cellular deployment. We develop important insights derived from the physical radio frequency (RF) channel properties and present a comprehensive overview on the application of DL for accurately estimating channel state information (CSI) with low overhead. We provide examples of successful DL application in CSI estimation for massive MIMO wireless systems and highlight several promising directions for future research.
An Integrated Development Environment for the Prototype Verification System
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

The steep learning curve of formal technologies is a well-known barrier to the adoption of formal verification tools in industry. This paper presents VSCode-PVS, a modern integrated development environment for the Prototype Verification System (PVS). This new environment integrates the editing and proof management functionalities of PVS in Visual Studio Code, a popular code editor widely used by software developers. VSCode-PVS provides functionalities that developers expect to find in modern verification tools, but are not available in the standard Emacs front-end of PVS, such as auto-completion, point-and-click navigation of definitions, live diagnostics for errors, and literate programming. The main features and architecture of the environment are presented, along with a comparison with other similar tools.
The TLA+ Toolbox
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

We discuss the workflows supported by the TLA+ Toolbox to write and verify specifications. We focus on features that are useful in industry because its users are primarily engineers. Two features are novel in the scope of formal IDEs: CloudTLC connects the Toolbox with cloud computing to scale up model checking. A Profiler helps to debug inefficient expressions and to pinpoint the source of state space explosion. For those who wish to contribute to the Toolbox or learn from its flaws, we present its technical architecture.
A Compared Study Between Some Subspace Based Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The technology of face recognition has made some progress in recent years. After studying the PCA, 2DPCA, R1-PCA, L1-PCA, KPCA and KECA algorithms, in this paper ECA (2DECA) is proposed by extracting features in PCA (2DPCA) based on Renyi entropy contribution. And then we conduct a study on the 2DL1-PCA and 2DR1-PCA algorithms. On the basis of the experiments, this paper compares the difference of the recognition accuracy and operational efficiency between the above algorithms.
Variational Recurrent Models for Solving Partially Observable Control Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In partially observable (PO) environments, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents often suffer from unsatisfactory performance, since two problems need to be tackled together: how to extract information from the raw observations to solve the task, and how to improve the policy. In this study, we propose an RL algorithm for solving PO tasks. Our method comprises two parts: a variational recurrent model (VRM) for modeling the environment, and an RL controller that has access to both the environment and the VRM. The proposed algorithm was tested in two types of PO robotic control tasks, those in which either coordinates or velocities were not observable and those that require long-term memorization. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieved better data efficiency and/or learned more optimal policy than other alternative approaches in tasks in which unobserved states cannot be inferred from raw observations in a simple manner.
Cooperative Job Dispatching in Edge Computing Network with Unpredictable Uploading Delay
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, the cooperative jobs dispatching problem in an edge computing network with multiple access points (APs) and edge servers is considered. Due to the uncertain traffic in the network between APs and edge servers, the job uploading delay can not be predicted accurately. Specifically, the job arrivals at the APs, the job uploading delay from APs to edge servers and the job computation time at the edge servers are all modeled as random variables. Since each job dispatching decision will affect the system state in the future, we formulate the joint optimization of jobs dispatching at all the APs and all the scheduling time slots as an infinite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP). The minimization objective is a discounted measurement of the average processing time per job, including the uploading delay, the waiting time and the computation time at the edge servers. In this problem, the approximate MDP should be adopted to address the curse of dimensionality. Conventional low-complexity approximate solution of MDP is usually hard to predict the performance analytically. In this paper, a novel approximate MDP solution framework is proposed via one-step policy iteration over a baseline policy, where the analytical performance bound can be obtained. Moreover, since the expression of the approximate value function is derived, the value iteration in conventional methods can be eliminated, which can essentially reduce the computation complexity. It is shown by simulations that proposed low-complexity algorithm has significantly better performance than various benchmark schemes.
2DR1-PCA and 2DL1-PCA: two variant 2DPCA algorithms based on none L2 norm
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, two novel methods: 2DR1-PCA and 2DL1-PCA are proposed for face recognition. Compared to the traditional 2DPCA algorithm, 2DR1-PCA and 2DL1-PCA are based on the R1 norm and L1 norm, respectively. The advantage of these proposed methods is they are less sensitive to outliers. These proposed methods are tested on the ORL, YALE and XM2VTS databases and the performance of the related methods is compared experimentally.
Wykorzystanie sztucznej inteligencji do generowania treści muzycznych
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2019
Year: 2019

This thesis is presenting a method for generating short musical phrases using a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN). To train neural network were used datasets of classical and jazz music MIDI recordings. Our approach introduces translating the MIDI data into graphical images in a piano roll format suitable for the network input size, using the RGB channels as additional information carriers for improved performance. The network has learned to generate images that are indistinguishable from the input data and, when translated back to MIDI and played back, include several musically interesting rhythmic and harmonic structures. The results of the conducted experiments are described and discussed, with conclusions for further work and a short comparison with selected existing solutions.
Predicting the Outcome of Judicial Decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this study, machine learning models were constructed to predict whether judgments made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) would lead to a violation of an Article in the Convention on Human Rights. The problem is framed as a binary classification task where a judgment can lead to a "violation" or "non-violation" of a particular Article. Using auto-sklearn, an automated algorithm selection package, models were constructed for 12 Articles in the Convention. To train these models, textual features were obtained from the ECHR Judgment documents using N-grams, word embeddings and paragraph embeddings. Additional documents, from the ECHR, were incorporated into the models through the creation of a word embedding (echr2vec) and a doc2vec model. The features obtained using the echr2vec embedding provided the highest cross-validation accuracy for 5 of the Articles. The overall test accuracy, across the 12 Articles, was 68.83%. As far as we could tell, this is the first estimate of the accuracy of such machine learning models using a realistic test set. This provides an important benchmark for future work. As a baseline, a simple heuristic of always predicting the most common outcome in the past was used. The heuristic achieved an overall test accuracy of 86.68% which is 29.7% higher than the models. Again, this was seemingly the first study that included such a heuristic with which to compare model results. The higher accuracy achieved by the heuristic highlights the importance of including such a baseline.
Big Data in Cloud Computing Review and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Big Data is used in decision making process to gain useful insights hidden in the data for business and engineering. At the same time it presents challenges in processing, cloud computing has helped in advancement of big data by providing computational, networking and storage capacity. This paper presents the review, opportunities and challenges of transforming big data using cloud computing resources.
COSMOS: Coordination of High-Level Synthesis and Memory Optimization for Hardware Accelerators
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Hardware accelerators are key to the efficiency and performance of system-on-chip (SoC) architectures. With high-level synthesis (HLS), designers can easily obtain several performance-cost trade-off implementations for each component of a complex hardware accelerator. However, navigating this design space in search of the Pareto-optimal implementations at the system level is a hard optimization task. We present COSMOS, an automatic methodology for the design-space exploration (DSE) of complex accelerators, that coordinates both HLS and memory optimization tools in a compositional way. First, thanks to the co-design of datapath and memory, COSMOS produces a large set of Pareto-optimal implementations for each component of the accelerator. Then, COSMOS leverages compositional design techniques to quickly converge to the desired trade-off point between cost and performance at the system level. When applied to the system-level design (SLD) of an accelerator for wide-area motion imagery (WAMI), COSMOS explores the design space as completely as an exhaustive search, but it reduces the number of invocations to the HLS tool by up to 14.6x.
A New Ensemble Method for Concessively Targeted Multi-model Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

It is well known that deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples crafted by maliciously adding perturbations to original inputs. There are two types of attacks: targeted attack and non-targeted attack, and most researchers often pay more attention to the targeted adversarial examples. However, targeted attack has a low success rate, especially when aiming at a robust model or under a black-box attack protocol. In this case, non-targeted attack is the last chance to disable AI systems. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new attack mechanism which performs the non-targeted attack when the targeted attack fails. Besides, we aim to generate a single adversarial sample for different deployed models of the same task, e.g. image classification models. Hence, for this practical application, we focus on attacking ensemble models by dividing them into two groups: easy-to-attack and robust models. We alternately attack these two groups of models in the non-targeted or targeted manner. We name it a bagging and stacking ensemble (BAST) attack. The BAST attack can generate an adversarial sample that fails multiple models simultaneously. Some of the models classify the adversarial sample as a target label, and other models which are not attacked successfully may give wrong labels at least. The experimental results show that the proposed BAST attack outperforms the state-of-the-art attack methods on the new defined criterion that considers both targeted and non-targeted attack performance.
BioConceptVec: creating and evaluating literature-based biomedical concept embeddings on a large scale
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Capturing the semantics of related biological concepts, such as genes and mutations, is of significant importance to many research tasks in computational biology such as protein-protein interaction detection, gene-drug association prediction, and biomedical literature-based discovery. Here, we propose to leverage state-of-the-art text mining tools and machine learning models to learn the semantics via vector representations (aka. embeddings) of over 400,000 biological concepts mentioned in the entire PubMed abstracts. Our learned embeddings, namely BioConceptVec, can capture related concepts based on their surrounding contextual information in the literature, which is beyond exact term match or co-occurrence-based methods. BioConceptVec has been thoroughly evaluated in multiple bioinformatics tasks consisting of over 25 million instances from nine different biological datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate that BioConceptVec has better performance than existing methods in all tasks. Finally, BioConceptVec is made freely available to the research community and general public via https://github.com/ncbi-nlp/BioConceptVec.
Probing the phonetic and phonological knowledge of tones in Mandarin TTS models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This study probes the phonetic and phonological knowledge of lexical tones in TTS models through two experiments. Controlled stimuli for testing tonal coarticulation and tone sandhi in Mandarin were fed into Tacotron 2 and WaveGlow to generate speech samples, which were subject to acoustic analysis and human evaluation. Results show that both baseline Tacotron 2 and Tacotron 2 with BERT embeddings capture the surface tonal coarticulation patterns well but fail to consistently apply the Tone-3 sandhi rule to novel sentences. Incorporating pre-trained BERT embeddings into Tacotron 2 improves the naturalness and prosody performance, and yields better generalization of Tone-3 sandhi rules to novel complex sentences, although the overall accuracy for Tone-3 sandhi was still low. Given that TTS models do capture some linguistic phenomena, it is argued that they can be used to generate and validate certain linguistic hypotheses. On the other hand, it is also suggested that linguistically informed stimuli should be included in the training and the evaluation of TTS models.